Want to join the Association of Consecrated Virgins?

"There are people who think I'm nuts," Lori Rose Cannizzaro said. In a recent ceremony at a Catholic altar, wearing a white gown and veil, the 42-year-old dedicated her virginity to Jesus.

Yesterday's rare Catholic ceremony in a Buffalo, New York suburb, a ceremony her own pastor didn't know existed, turned Cannizzaro into a "consecrated virgin." Fewer than 200 women in the United States and 2,000 worldwide have declared their perpetual virginity this way, according to U.S. Association of Consecrated Virgins.

After the ceremony, these women wear a band on their left ring finger. They "really" marry Christ, though they are not nuns.

"It is a good and holy thing to want to be in a virginal state," she said.

The idea of consecrated virgins faded in the Middle Ages, but Pope Paul VI restored the rite in 1970. Only a bishop can perform the special Mass. Bishop Edward Kmiec led Cannizzaro's ceremony at her home parish, Immaculate Conception.

"Dating wasn't working. I wasn't connecting," she said. "Not that I never wanted to be married or never wanted children."

Read the story.

There's even a website devoted to telling you how to do this yourself. I hope I'm not the only one who sees the bizarre irony in the site's headline of "Behold! The Bridegroom Comes!"

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